A few weeks ago, a random email asked if I wanted to take part in helping promote Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus on a blog book tour. As a follower of Clay’s writing for many years, I enthusiastically said yes, and they sent a hard copy of the book (I ended up buying a …
Category Archives: books
Summer Reading
Obit is a great book I’ve been meaning to mention here. When I was at the news writer workshop last month, I learned that there’s a great tradition in obituary writing where journalists don’t simply summarize two lines about a death, viewings, and family left behind. Some actually go out and interview people and piece …
What the hell, old school bloggers?
On some random blog, I found a link to this book “Founders at Work“, a book interviewing the founders of tech companies. The person mentioned Caterina talks about Flickr in it, among big famous 70s and 80s software geniuses so I ordered it thinking it’d be a history book about a bunch of classic Silicon …
One freaky year
According to the NYT, Freakonomics was the most blogged-about book of the year, which isn’t too surprising considering how much I read about it on pretty much every blog that mentions books. It is impressive that it beat Harry Potter out this year, since everyone I know seemed to mention that book at least once …
The age of paradox
I noticed a trend in the books I’ve read lately (Everything Bad Is Good for You, Blink, and Freakonomics) is to point out things in our culture that should seem one way, but turn out to be another way entirely. This is just a datapoint, but I couldn’t help but wonder all last summer about …
Freakonomics
I ran a bunch of errands today and plowed through the entire audiobook of Freakonomics. I’d say I liked it even more than Blink. It turns just about every issue on its ear with a look at the data surrounding it. Babies, Guns, Schools, Corporations, Crime, Sports, Abortion, Drugs, Cheating, Gangs, Murder… everything gets the …
Hacking MT book coming soon
I’ve been working on a few chapters for this book going on at least a year now, if not more. Let’s put it this way: when we started, we had barely any contact with folks at Six Apart and I had to strain my friendship with the Trotts to get them to answer questions about …
Dead pixels instead of dead trees
I love books, I love browsing stacks, I love libraries, I love Powell’s in Portland, I like collecting books, I always have a stack nearby to read, I love looking through picture books, and I love books even though I didn’t really become much of a reader until the end of my college years (I …
What’s the Matter with Kansas
I bought and listened to Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas (it’s just a 45min monologue at the iTMS). Frank uncovers how the GOP became the voice of the everyman while pushing law and policy that generally benefit the upper class most of all. It’s a vexing problem but I’ve always attributed it to …
A Whole Lotta Nothing 